[TBD]Role of service mesh in micro-services ecosystem

Introduction

Laymen explanation

Over the past few years, the service mesh has risen from relative obscurity to become a standard component of the cloud native stack.

At its core, a service mesh adds reliability, security, and observability features to a microservice application by managing the way that communication happens between the services.

If you love to know how it is done, then this document helps.

Technical explanation

A service mesh, like the open source project Istio, is a way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another. Unlike other systems for managing this communication, a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer built right into an app.

Architecture

Service mesh options in K8s

• • Istio

  • Linkerd

  • Consul

Istio service mesh architecture

Example use-case where it helps

Modern applications are often broken down in this way, as a network of services each performing a specific business function. In order to execute its function, one service might need to request data from several other services. But what if some services get overloaded with requests, like the retailer’s inventory database? This is where a service mesh comes in—it routes requests from one service to the next, optimizing how all the moving parts work together. This is done by service graph.

Detailed Use-cases

Focus on business goal

Developers can focus on adding business value, instead of connecting services

K8s deployment Troubleshoot

Distributed tracing of requests flow is useful for troubleshoot.

Optimize inter-service communication

Using service mesh performance metrics, Optimise service-to-service communication path

Failure handling

If a given service fails, a service mesh can collect data on how long it took before a retry succeeded. This data can be used to ensure that the system does not become overburdened by unnecessary retries.

Seamless service upgrades

First, you expose only a small subset of users to the new version, validate it, then proceed to release it to all instances in Production. This can be done since service mesh has the ability to control traffic.

Production testing assistance

With the ability to inject delays, faults to improve the robustness of deployments.

Reference

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/microservices/what-is-a-service-mesh

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https://buoyant.io/2020/10/12/what-is-a-service-mesh/

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